Medieval You?

[telophase]

Over at Twenty Sided, Shamus is wondering if you'd be dead or alive if you were in medieval Europe. (It's also been posted in a few other places, so you might have seen it around the Net today.)

I think he's a bit pessimistic on the age of marriage - it depends on a number of factors, including urban or rural location, wars, etc. - but that's beside the point: in order to entertain me, tell me: would you have survived the Middle Ages in Europe or an equivalent economy/technology level where you would have been? Assume that your health history up to now is more-or-less the same - car accidents being some sort of equivalent accident, etc. - so you didn't die in a plague unless you were, say, me and had MALARIA as a child. :)

I'm really on the edge, but provisionally leaning towards dead. I had the aforementioned malaria at 5, but it was a light case and we knocked it out thoroughly enough that I never had relapses. Which I doubt would have been the case back then (malaria was known in medieval Europe). People can survive malaria for many years, but I think something like the severe malnutrition caused by lactose intolerance in a dairy-based economy would have done me in during a relapse in my early 20s. As I'm in my mid-30s, single, without kids, and working in an academic milieu I assume my medieval self entered the Church at a young age and I resided in an abbey until I died. But that brings up another point: if it was a well-off abbey, I'd have had better nutrition and medical care, so might have survived, if they could figure out that it was milk doing me in.

Off to lunch! I'll read when I come back. :)

Comments

[flusterdance.livejournal.com]

Where would you be in Medieval Europe?

Dead. If I hadn't had a host of medical complaints as a child (including Scarlet Fever), then my deviant ways would most likely have gotten me excecuted for something long ago. (And I suspect the treatments for my various ailments wouldn't make me too strong, either.)

[lady-noremon.livejournal.com]

I had scarlet fever too! Strawberry buddies :3

*lmao*

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Spinal meningitis, age six months. Was kinda touch and go in the 1960s. Middle ages, just another dead baby.

[celestriad.livejournal.com]

i might have been dead. i got pneumonia once as a kid, probably around the same age as you were when you got malaria (my memory is kind of fuzzy). there was also one time when the doctors thought i had meningitis and even did a spinal tap on me. all i remember of that episode was staying in the hospital for a few days, thankfully. i don't think it was meningitis, but i also don't know if they ever found out what made me sick. i think i just got better and went home. :P

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I really can't tell how severely the anemia and vertigo would have affected a pre-modern life. I haven't had severe accidents because of them as things stand, but I've been able to, say, throw my clothes in the washer rather than having to haul them down to the river to deal with sopping wet while I'm having a dizzy spell. I can microwave some frozen soup from the grocery store if I'm hungry, dizzy, and home alone, rather than having to deal with sharp objects and open flames when I'm on the verge of falling over.

Also, I've been using reliable birth control for eight years now. I don't think that maps to "celibate," so either "presumed infertile" or "the risks of having N kids" -- and the latter is significant.

[lady-noremon.livejournal.com]

Or crushed for being possessed (as in having spells/dizziness, most likely caused by the devil)

But yeah anemia sucks.

[stardustmajick.livejournal.com]

No, I probably wouldn't have died unless I were burned as a heretic but I think I'd still be smart enough not to go into my beliefs in mixed company. ;D I've never have more than a simple cold (and I mean that to include every sort of illness imaginable, my immune system is the shit). Never broken any bones or been in any sort of accident or wreck. I'm a history major and I love to read but I also like to do things like sew and I want kids but I don't really want to deal with them until they can hold intelligent conversation. *shifty* So maybe I'd be a noble woman. :D Being married off at 13 would fix the whole chronically single thing. My hips are serviceable, so I doubt I'd die in childbirth. I'd probably live into "old age" barring catastrophe.

That was fun. :D

[stardustmajick.livejournal.com]

I meant to say "and my family has been upper middle class for generations" as part of the noblewoman reasoning. Maybe the daughter of a baron.

[kintail.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have been born alive, and would have taken my mother out with me: she had an "invisible" spinal deformity that meant the birth canal couldn't dialate fully because the tailbone couldn't get out of the way -- the doctors didn't realize this and do a c-section until 11 hours of excruciating labour, as she often liked to remind me.

After that was a year of colic and then a childhood and adolescence that involved a bout of at least one of pneumonia, bronchitis, or severe strep throat each year, and I don't think I would have made it to the car accident at age 19. Yey.

[trobadora]

Dead. Very, very dead - heart condition. :-(

[emtigereyes.livejournal.com]

While I'd beat that I'd be le dead, it kind of depends:

I had chicken pox at age 3, but even in the Middle Ages, that wasn't the end of the world. If it were of the small pox variety, however, no dice.

Still, even if we ignore that one, diabetes likely would have taken me. Now, I say "likely" because the type I have is triggered (so the theory goes) when we get infected by a virus that, at the cellular level, appears nearly identical to the insulin-producing cells, so the body kills both (due to a mutation of some kind, my immune system can't tell the difference). Without insulin, your body can't convert carbs into energy, so you literally starve to death no matter how much you eat. Being omnivores, we can't live on meat alone. If said virus hadn't evolved yet, then I'd be fine.

I've always been decently healthy, due to an active childhood... I'll assume no matter what social station I ended up in, I'd be active to a similar degree (though nobility means I'd be left indoors embroidering... *bleh*) I come from family lines that have had many children, so I don't think child birth would take me.

[helen-keeble.livejournal.com]

I'd be effectively blind (my eyes are at -8.5, so I literally can't see past the end of my own nose), mostly deaf (childhood ear infection), probably without much of a sense of smell (adenoidal infection), and be missing one ear (reattached through plastic surgery - I have a lifelong wariness of rocking horses because of this incident) and the index finger of my left hand (cut down to the bone in a cooking accident).

I'm thinking that catalog of ailments probably leaves me dead by misadventure in the Middle Ages. I probably fell down a well or got trampled by oxen. :-)

In the unlikely event that I survived childhood, I imagine that I'd be either an old maid or married off to some undesirable who couldn't do any better...

My dad would be alive; my mom would have died giving birth to my brother, who would have been stillborn.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

Dead.

Beyond all the issues involving being a blind, unmarried Jewess with no domestic skills to speak of, or any illnesses I might/might not contract, without modern anti-depressant medication I'd have likely committed suicide in my mid-twenties.

Burned

[naturalfractual.livejournal.com]

They'd have burned me. Female, no male to care for me, always offering advice, handing out remedies, sharing knowledge - greatest threat of the age - that would have been me. Toast.

Re: Burned

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Especially if you owned property that someone else wanted. :)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Let's assume I'm in my ancestral village in now-Lithuania...

First, my mother required expert help to carry me to term, in the shape of Chinese herbal therapy, which would not have been available in said village. So I might not have been born at all. On the other hand, the doctor's thought for the cause of her repeated miscarriages was too many psychoactive drugs, which also weren't available then, so let's say I was born.

I'm extremely nearsighted, which could have led to a nasty accident, but probably I would have adapted to navigate the world with the sight I had-- nearsightedness is very common, and if it was all that deadly, it probably wouldn't be as common as it is.

I had German measles, which is not dangerous; an infected cut, which might have been. I think I would have made it to the age of 30, which is when I had a severe ear infection that nearly put me in the hospital on IV antibiotics, and probably would have led to deafness, brain damage, or death without antibiotic treatment. But by then I probably would have had several little babies, and at least perpetuated my nearsighted genes.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh, and substituting a nasty cart-and-horse accident for the car crash, I would have ended up with severe chronic pain and some limited mobility, but it wouldn't have killed me.

[cschells.livejournal.com]

All else aside, I would likely have died in childbirth with my first kid (I might have had a really kick-ass midwife in a medieval setting, too, but she wouldn't have been working in a sterile environment, with sterile instruments, and the I.V. and oxygen ended up being quite useful, not to mention the narcotics--love those!). But I've thought about the food allergy/lactose intolerance question before, and I'm not sure as many people would end up with these conditions in preindustrial settings. The bulk of my food allergy problems arose as a complication of taking oral hormonal contraceptives, so if I had never encountered those it wouldn't really be an issue for me, I guess.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the lactose intolerance thing is questionable. It's a recessive trait, which means that both of my parents - who both could drink milk - carried one dominant gene for tolerance and one recessive for intolerance. I got the lucky 25% chance that made me a double-recessive. And as both my parents come from Western European backgrounds, the recessive genes were running around there.

I also didn't get this way until adulthood. If I'd developed it as a child, especially at a nursing age, it probably would have killed me through malnutrition. If I bore and nursed children and couldn't drink milk/eat cheese, I'd be severely calcium deficient as my bones and teeth were plundered to make and feed children, or I'd drink/eat it anyway and be seriously malnourished because it hinders absorption of nutrients. As a single woman living in an abbey ... hard to say.

[viridian5.livejournal.com]

As a kid I kept getting strep throat so badly and so often that I got a case of it the day they initially scheduled the surgery to take my tonsils out, so that might have become a problem in the days of pre-surgery. I had a severe case of chicken pox at 12 that might have gotten me. Chronic sinus infections starting in my teens would have been very bad without antibiotics. I've never actually been pregnant or gone through childbirth, but my physique (seriously tipped uterus, small and narrow everything) suggests that attempting to birth a child might kill us both in more primitive times.

I may be suffering painful aftereffects from neurosurgery now, but the Chiari I malformation really was slowly killing me prior to surgery to alleviate the brain compression, so if I'd survived to my thirties I'd have become paralyzed and eventually died if I hadn't just slid into death first.

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

Very much alive.

I've no major allergies, chronic or hereditary diseases, or childhood trauma. I've got all my original teeth and am built like a friggin' draft horse, so that would've been in my favor. So aside from any mishaps due to poor vision and big feet, I think I'd have been a survivor. And probably not fat. Based on the family history, I'd guess that I'd be somewhere between the free yeomen, the merchants, or the lower aristocracy, socially speaking, which would increase my chances of survival to "old age".

[chomiji]

Well, I woulda been a Jew. In Poland or Bessarabia (Russia/Romania borderlands). So let's assume it was a good period, with no pogroms. And let's assume that my maternal grandfather was a prosperous merchant (as he was, in fact) so he would have been able to give my mother (his only daughter) a large enough dowery so that my poor scholarly father (an engineer/inventor in modern times) would have been able to raise us with adequate food and shelter.

I was a pretty healthy kid, except for bizarre eyesight that went crosseyed-farsighted-nearsighted. I was clumsy, and I did fracture a wrist at age 8, but it was a simple fracture, so it might have healed OK even back then.

But I had bronchial pneumonia several times during my 20s, and any case of that might have killed me if it hadn't been for antibiotics. And then there was the 98% blockage of the left anterior descending artery of my heart (the big artery that comes across and down on the front of the heart) when I was 31 ... they wouldn't have had angioplasty back then, and an increase in the blockage or a quite small blood clot could have killed me quite dead after that.

So I think I'd be dead more than 15 years ago by this time.

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Well, firstly, my mother would never have made it out of infancy without penicillin, so I probably wouldn't have been born at all. But assuming I had-- my lactose intolerance would have been severe enough to prevent me from nursing, so my chances aren't good, and I'd probably have been severely malnourished even if I did enter an abbey very young (which I think I clearly did.) Then there's the severe myopia and the messed up feet (extra bone in each one), which going barefoot or in inadequate shoes would not have helped with. So I'd be half-blind and half-lame even if I did survive.

My odds of survival wouldn't be good, though. I might have been done in when I was ten by the severe stomach flu I had-- I didn't require hospitalization, and the only drugs I was given, acid reducers, weren't necessary for my survival, but I went a week without being able to keep any food down at all-- lost ten pounds when I'd only weighed about seventy to start with. If I'd been as malnourished and runty as I think the lactose intolerance would have made me, I don't know that I could have withstood that.

And if I'd survived the flu, I think my wisdom teeth might have done me in at sixteen; I had two complete sets and they were all impacted. I don't know, *can* you die of an impacted wisdom tooth?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

If the impacted wisdom tooth gets infected, yup. Especially if it's the upper teeth: from what I understand, those roots go pretty deep and close to the brain. I might be wrong, but I think that's the case.

[janni.livejournal.com]

If the pneumonia I had as a kid didn't kill me, I think I might be alive--but that the untreated asthma would have left me a sickly invalid. And within a few years, the family tendency to high cholesterol and high blood pressure would likely do me in in the cardiovascular department.

[puddingcat.livejournal.com]

*Probably* on the cart. I was in an incubator for a couple of weeks because I wouldn't breathe, but that was a result of being induced and Mum being given 10 times the dosage of inducing drugs necessary.

So ignoring that, I've had no life-threatening illnesses or accidents. I've generally been feek & weeble though - many, many colds, kidney infections and generally being under the weather. Since Mum's ancestors were from the Shetland Isles, I doubt I'd have survived long.

(I'm putting the depression stuff down to modern-day pressures and assuming it wouldn't have been an issue.)

[the_rck]

I'd be dead. I was born premature. If that didn't get me, my asthma to smoke and allergies to pretty much all non-human mammals would.

[wyrdness.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I think I would probably have made it.I've been pretty healthy during my life bar one or two things and I don't have any allergies.

As a baby I had a mild case of chicken pox thanks to my sister, but apart from the fact I was so young and had to wear mittens to stop scratching I dont think it would have killed me. I also had flu about 8 years ago, but I also don't think it would have been enough to kill me in the medieval era (I think I was mostly over it before my mum finally made me go to the doctors). I also had my gall bladder out because it was filled with stones, but I don't think I would have had problems with it with a medieval diet and even that wouldn't kill me (though at the time I thought the pain would).

So apart from the possibility my family would be dirt poor peasants in Yorkshire (though some of my family are rich, so who knows?) working against me it's looking pretty good. Though it's weird to think that even back then I'd be married with kids, I've always been adamant I'm not going to have kids and considering how strong Christianity was back then and my natural inclinations I expect I'd have most likely have become a nun.

[wyrdness.livejournal.com]

Oh, I also had childhood asthma, but it wasn't severe and I grew out of it before I was 12 so given that I'd have been walking around a hell of a lot more (up and down incredibly hilly terrain) and would have been a lot healthier than I was as a child I don't think it would have got me either. :)

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

If we go with the European ancestry I would have been either poor in Holland or poor in Iceland. Either way, I'm built like a workhorse and come from a long line of people who work the earth. Aside from arthritis I'd probably be a bit healthier if I had lived then if only because I wouldn't have access to rich foods and I would exercise daily.

However, I did contract pneumonia as a baby and had to be hospitalized. Ever since my lungs have been week and as a teen I contracted a bacterial infection in my lungs which I dealt with for over six months before I broke down and got antibiotics. Still, if I could have survived those, I would be in good shape.

My grandmother's parents both lived into their nineties and they were Dutch Mennonite homesteaders and worked like dogs their entire lives.

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

Dead. I had a severe case of jaundice when I was born, caused by incompatible Rh factors between me and my Mom. It took 3 total transfusions to save me.

If I'd survived that, I'd probably have been okay - I had a mild case of hepatitis when I was a kid that I was half-over by the time Mom noticed and hauled me to the hospital. No broken bones, no serious health conditions (and the ones I have wouldn't be a problem if I'd just lose some weight) and the worst threat would be my bad vision and tendency to be a little too smart for my own good. Dad's family were minor nobility back in England, so I'd have probably wound up a spinster aunt or in the convent... which is a scary thought for a pagan!

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Hard to say: I've never had measles, polio, smallpox, etc., because of modern vaccines. But assuming that I would have survived those: I might actually have done okay. I come from a very healthy stock. The one thing is that I am painfully nearsighted. Had I been a guy, I'd have been okay; they'd have noticed that I was book smart and could draw but couldn't walk around outside without tripping over my own feet, and would have packed me off to a monastery toot sweet. I'd have spent the rest of my life happily illuminating things and buggering the novices. Could be worse. But I am a girl and a firstborn, so I'd probably have been married off and be a grandmother by now. Hell, I'd be Nanny Ogg by now. :) There are worse fates.

[bitpig.livejournal.com]

Dead — childhood asthma, plus untreated Major Depressive Disorder, the latter of which damned near killed me in the 20th Century. Perhaps if I'd survived the asthma I'd have been able to become a monk, where a life of deep spiritual contemplation, prayer, and hard work would have given me reason to live. It all depends on where the prospective Middle Ages "me" would have been living: I can see myself surviving in temperate, Catholic Bavaria, but in bitter, heathen Scotland, probably not. My Scots ancestors would probably have burnt me in a wicker man to make the turnips grow.

Incidentally, the real Middle Ages weren't as bad as the movies would have them. You should check out Michael Flynn's latest SF novel Eifelheim (http://www.amazon.com/Eifelheim-Michael-Flynn/dp/0765300966) for a poignant, historically-accurate, and highly-entertaining depiction of everyday life in the Black Forest village of Oberhochwald in 14th Century Germany (with aliens). The folk of the Middle Ages weren't the stereotypical superstitious savages at all; in fact, they were in many ways far more civilized and erudite than we.